Sea of Thieves’ big Forsaken Shores update is delayed until next week

Rare has announced that Forsaken Shores, the major new content update for multiplayer pirate adventure Sea of Thieves, has been delayed. It was originally due to launch this Wednesday, September 19th, but is now scheduled to arrive next week, on Thursday 27th September.

Sea of Thieves’ executive producer Joe Neate first warned of a potential delay to Forsaken Shores in a progress update on the game’s official forum late last week. At the time, he noted that, “our last couple of updates have seen issues introduced into the build (such as the unfortunate spyglass incident) or have required emergency maintenance immediately following release. With Forsaken Shores it’s our priority to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

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To that end, the decision has now been made to officially delay the content update, with Neate explaining in a follow-up post that, “Our priority is to ensure we deliver a stable, polished and bug-free experience that all our players can enjoy. We have just had a weekend of Pioneer testing, which has highlighted a memory issue in the build.” This, says Neate, is “resulting in an unstable build where a large number of our Pioneers were experiencing crashes.” Rare is currently working to resolve the “complex issue”, but does not “feel in a position to release Forsaken Shores to our players with confidence this week.”

The current goal is to fix the memory issue and ensure ample time for additional testing so that the team can be confident the problems are solved. “I know this will be disappointing,” concluded Neate, “but I resolutely believe this is the right decision. We are committed to giving everyone the best Forsaken Shores release experience, and this will enable that.”

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Forsaken Shores is the third major content update to be released for Sea of Thieves since the game’s launch in March this year. Previous updates, The Hungering Deep and Cursed Sails, have introduced the likes of a new three-man Brigantine, cursed cannonballs, a roaming AI-controlled megalodon threat, and skeleton ships battles.

Forsaken Shores, however, is substantially larger than previous updates, adding an entire new region to the game – in the form of the volcanic Devil’s Roar – as well as rowboats, a new delivery mission type known as Cargo Runs, new tougher quest variants, NPCs on islands, and more. Hopefully Rare can address all remaining issues before Forsaken Shores’ new release date of Thursday 27th September rolls around.